Subscribe To Comments Reloaded 2.0.2

The Lowdown:It has some nice features for managing the comments you can customize the subscription choices and default it to subscribe when they leave a comment. Your users get an opportunity to manage their subscriptions and event turn them off when they have had enough of a particular thread. There is a double opt in for the subscriptions so that they can not be spammed. There is a purge of the requests if they have not been acted on. if you have multiple authors you can have them be auto subscribed. And they can subscribe without commenting. Plus you can manage the subscription list.

The Lowdown:Ever made a comment on a site and hit submit only to see that glaring error, well time to convince you favorite WordPress site to start using this plugin. You can give them a time limit for how long they have to make their edits before comment becomes permanent. You can limit certain types of edits such as name, email and url. You can allow registered users an unlimited amount of time to edit comments. You can stop edits if additional comments are added to thread this prevent take backs. It provides a spell checker to make life a little easier. You can customize look and feel. All in all pretty nice way of allowing visitors to leave the best comments they can.
Rating 4 Dragons

Change Permalink Helper 0.1

The Lowdown:This is pretty straightforward just turn on and go, seems to work fine. Of course the reason for needing this is when you upgrade a WordPress website and make a change to the permalinks like I did recently for a client. What had happened was he had been using a permalink of year/month/day/slug and I changed it to post type. It broke many of his internal links in his posts. This plugin fixed that by redirecting properly to the new permalink.

**** Plugins Reviewed by Marcus ****

Multiple Featured Images

Multiple featured images

This plugin allows you to add additional featured images to a post or page.

Features

Add as many featured images as you need

Fully customizable output – so it’s multilingual

From the Author: For one of my customers I had to assign two featured images to pages. One featured image was used as the header image and the other as a small button for the submenu. The images had to be different too (so I couldn’t simply use different images sizes) and so I wrote this little plugin.

Author: Marcus Kober

Marcus’ Take: I had a strange need for this while doing work for a new client. They had a directory site that needed the features in both the main home page and on the category page. This plugin did the trick with a little handle jiggling.
Rating: 3 Dragons

Display lifestream of events from different social sites, news feeds or any RSS feed. Default sites include: Twitter, Delicious, YouTube and Digg. For other sites, get the RSS and add that using this plugin. For more details, visit https://nischalmaniar.com/social-timeline

Marcus’ Take: I’ve not fully implemented this plugin yet, but plan to on my main marcuscouch.com site. With my personal site I’ve chosen to make it a stage for all the different social streams that I regularly engage in. Right now I’m using the Tapestry Genesis child theme, but might change up if I can get this plugin to work like I want it. It does everything I want it to do, pulling in all of my latest blurbs, photos, status and video from the various locations.
Rating: 3 Dragons

Removes the default WordPress widgets. Period. Seriously, this plugin doesn’t do anything else. It just prevents WordPress from registering its default widgets. Upload the plugin to your blog, and activate it. Browse to Appearance – Widgets to make sure it’s working.

Marcus’ Take: Sometimes a lazy plugin is just something that gives you a clean slate to work with. This is one of those plugins. Often we get tired of the “stock” widgets and want to work with an empty palate. This is a one click solution for eliminating your off-the-rack widgets.

New Flexibility plus Enhanced Webmaster Experience

Changing the footer ‘Copyright/Credits’ & ‘Return to Top’ in Genesis is already easy with the use of Genesis Footer Shortcodes or some other plugins. However, it COULD still be much easier and more flexible with Widgets in WordPress! This plugin just achieves that, and at the same time keeping full Genesis Shortcodes support for the footer section! Yes, it’s that cool! ;-)
You can use up to two widgets! Place one – full-width then – or two (one third/two thirds then) and get back the flexibility you’ve wanted for this area! Manage your copyright/credits stuff the way YOU want it, without messing up your ‘functions.php’ file… Just place in a text widget with copyright stuff, another one with logos and/or affiliate links, an additional search widget, widget, some explanation via text widget… You got it. The possibilities are endless. Finally.
A great helper tool for Genesis Child Themes!

Marcus’ Take: I’ve recently gotten back into the Genesis based theme framework and found that the customization is still in need of a few tweaks no matter what I do. This plugin took care of the customization of the footer in just a few clicks after install. If you use Genesis, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to install and use this handy widget area plugin.
Rating: 4 Dragons

Ad Injection 1.2.0.11

What They Say:Ad Injection from reviewmylife injects any kind of advert or other content (e.g. Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc) into the existing content of your WordPress posts and pages. You can control the number of adverts based on the post length, and it can restrict who sees adverts by post age, visitor referrer and IP address. Adverts can be configured in the post (random, top, and bottom positions) or in any widget/sidebar area. There’s support for A:B split testing / ad rotation. And the dynamic restrictions (by IP and referrer) work with WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache and WP Cache.
New Features 1.2.x.x

Set the position of the top and bottom advert by paragraph or character.

Position the random ads to start or stop in the middle of the post.

Stop the random ads 2/3 of the way down a post, or at a paragraph/character position from the beginning/end of the post.

Fade unused Home/Archive options instead of making them disappear.

Add page age settings to status.

Improve debug messages.

What I Say:I found this to be a very robust plugin for managing ads, It seems to me more geared towards using codes like adsense than say uploading your own images and having it general an ad for you. It does have a pretty nice interface but it does take some time to configure up and learn your way around it’s pretty complex but performs well.
Rating 4 Dragons

What they say:

This widget makes it possible for you to display 125×125 ad squares ( or some other configurable size ) into a widget-ready bar for WordPress®. You can have just 2 squares, or as many as 8 running together. It also supports multi-widget options. So technically you could have even more than 8 if you add it to a bar more than once. Each ad square accepts any HTML/JavaScript code, so it will work with standard affiliate ads, or even with ad network codes. You can also configure the widget to shuffle the positioning of your squares if you like.
The Ad Squares widget supports embedded PHP code too. If you know a little PHP scripting, you could add conditionals to the code that you place into this widget. For example, if you wanted to show different ads based on the category that is currently being displayed on your blog, you could do something like

What I say:
Pretty decent for setup, once installed simply add widget and configure the size ads you want to display seems you can mix and match as you want also it is built for 125x ads but I used it to create 120×200 ads side by side pretty simple and works great. On a side note I am noticing that most ad injection plugins for WordPress simply allow you to place code in there. I will be continuing what I started a while ago and that is to run my own Open-x ad server to handle my changing out of ads and tracking.
Rating : 4 Dragons

Quick Adsense is an Ads management WordPress plugin. It offers a quicker & flexible way to insert Adsense or any Ads code into a blog post. Besides, it can randomly place the Ads anywhere within a post. It comes with a simple setting page, and it does not overwhelm you with complicated customizable options.

In general, placing Adsense randomly within a post is a good way to experiment a variety of ads formats & placements besides optimizing your Adsense. If you have many regular visitors who frequently revisit your blog, the randomization will likely catch their attention.

Here are some features that come with this plugin:

Absolutely NO author revenue reward or revenue sharing from your Adsense or that kind of features.

Default Ads positioning: Assign Ads to the beginning of post, assign Ads to the middle of post, assign Ads to the end of post, assign Ads after certain paragraphs (3 options available) & assign Ads after certain images.

Tags above can be inserted into a post easily via the additional Quicktag Buttons added to the HTML Edit Post SubPanel.

What I say:Offers a lot of configuration options and numerous ad block placements throughout your post.
The widgets are separate and only place one ad at a time not what I was looking for but a nice way of adding ad code via widgets. You can also assign ads to specific paragraphs and enable and disable on the home page. All in all not too bad but not as robust as I thought it would be.
Rating 3 Dragons.

manage capabilities: choose the roles that can send newsletter, manage subscribers and settings

view sending report: how many subscribers have opened the newsletter and clicked on links inside it

multilanguage: set all texts and options, you can write multilanguage newsletters – full integration with WPML, qTranslate

debug tool: rather than the recipients, you can send all emails of a newsletter to the author or you can have them recorded into a log file

What I say:Setting up was pretty nice some nice functions for the plugin and nice choices for a theme for the newsletter. It creates the newsletters as a custom post type which make managing them much easier the mailpress. It does have a couple of quirks when importing the csv file but they are easily solved. You can set up a proper cron job to manage the sending or use the wp-cron. It even has some pretty decent stats combined with others you can find out what is happening to your newsletter. All in all pretty nice plugin
rating 5 dragons

**** Plugins Reviewed by Marcus ****

Up Posts is a widget in you sidebar that allows you to display your upcoming posts to your readers. This will create anticipation. More importantly, the widget gets your reader to come back to your blog.

Here are some options:
– Number of upcoming posts to display
– Choose whether to show scheduled posts, drafts, or both.
– Include link to sign-up to newsletter

Rating: 4 Dragons

—
Slideshttps://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/slides/
Slides is a slideshow plugin for jQuery that is built with simplicity in mind. Packed with a useful set of features to help novice and advanced developers alike create elegant and user-friendly slideshows. It can be used within articles as well as theme files. It does not modify any other images or galleries.

You can customize these in the Settings section:
– Preload images in an image based slideshow.
– Autoplay slideshow and duration.
– Pause slideshow on click of next/prev or pagination and time of pause.
– Pause slideshow on hovering.

John’s & Marcus Rant: What to rant about?

A report back on the caching plugin, DB Cache Reloaded Fix found that it conflicts with event espresso causing it not to carry forward pricing.

Shout Outs:

Shoutout from Marcus to Mark Fail, the developer of PremiumPress (premiumpress.com). Mark has a great set of WordPress themes, and really helped me out with a banner customization issue for one of my sites, https://hostingpromocode.com Thanks Mark!

Listener Feedback / Audio Clips

Clip from David Dell in Australia with a question about importing lots of audio clips to a WordPress installation. https://dd3.tv

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

WP CleanFix is a management tool for for check, repair, fix and optimize your WordPress blog. The Ajax interface allow to manage all status in one only page! Remember: This software is free. You don’t need to donate money to support it. Just talk about it.
FEATURES

CleanFix Tools

Extends HTML Editor: fontname, size, color, extra tags

Remove Frontend admin bar

Database Tables optimization

Check/Remove for unused UserMeta

Check/Remove for Post Revision and Trash

Check/Remove Auto Draft Posts

Check/Remove Edit Post Lock

Check/Remove for unused Post Meta

And more…….

What I say:

Pretty nice once you find the new menu link under the main dashboard menu.. There really needs to be some consistency on how plugin menus are created. It show you all the places on your site that need to be cleaned up and with the click of a button it does just that it even optimizes your database for you. You can even go to the advanced and adjust your html editor size and font use and limit your excerpt length. All in all pretty decent it even has a find and replace feature for post and page content.
Rating 5 Dragons:

What they say:Share&Get it ! automatically provides you with either Facebook fans or Twitter followers in return for downloadable files. Once you’ve installed Share&Get it ! on your WordPress website, your number of visitors will dramatically increase in no time. To obtain such great results, you only need to copy/paste the shortcodes you get when setting up the buttons.
Those buttons enable you to share any type of content from music, photos, videos, wallpapers to Ebooks, software, tutorials, icons, Web resources and so much more.
It’s now time for you to do the maths: One download = One new Facebook fan or One new Twitter follower
Easy translation made possible
Share&Get it ! is a piece of cake to translate! Our built-in files help you get the job done.

What I say:
It is pretty straightforward to setup and get a button created it even works quite nicely. I am only concerned about one thing they run it through their website when connecting it wih twitter and probably facebook since I only tested twitter. Due to that I had to mark it down.
Rating 4 Dragons

From the new this week
WP Gift Certificate Reloaded Lite 1.27

What They Say:WP Gift Certificate Reloaded Lite is a plugin which allows you to manage and sell printable gift certificates on your website. You can sell them to your visitors, and accept payments via PayPal. It’s easy, install the plugin and open new feature for your customers!
How the plugin works?
FRONT END
The visitor view part of the plugin consists of simple form where your visitors can purchase gift certificates.
Front end workflow. Let’ imagine that I sell gift certificate for visiting museum, and you are the visitor who purchases the certificate.

You fill up the form and click “Continue” button. Then system asks you to confirm your action.

You click “Confirm” button and being redirected to PayPal, where you can pay for certificate(s).

After successfull payment you receive e-mail (it is sent to your PayPal e-mail address) which contains link to printable gift certificate.

You click this link and see printable gift certificate(s), see below:

You print this certificate and bring it to ticket booth of my museum.

I scan QR Code and being redirected to certificate page where I can see certificate details and manage it. (For example, I can see transaction details and mark certificates as redeemed).

Then I allow you to visit museum. This is just particular situation how the plugin might be used. You can use it for selling any gift certificates. Unlimited possibilities.

If you require more features/functions, please visit the website for more information.

What I Say:
Damn it actually works with no effort what else can I say just what I was looking for.
Rating 5 Dragons

**** Plugins Reviewed by Marcus ****

Private Facebook

Private Facebook is a simple plugin for allowing a certain list of persons by their Facebook account. Users can ask for permissions to read the blog, then you’d have to approve them so they can read it.

Marcus’ Take: This is a really cool start to a plugin that I’d like to see expanded. Easy to set up but a bit difficult to get all your FB friends connected to it.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Easy Digital Downloads

This plugin is very much still in beta. Use on production sites is not yet recommended
Selling digital downloads is something that not a single one of the large WordPress ecommerce plugins has ever gotten really right. This plugin aims to fix that. Instead of focusing on providing every single feature under the sun, Easy Digital Downloads trys to provide only the ones that you really need. It aims to make selling digital downloads through WordPress easy, and complete.
As this plugin is still in beta, it is strongly encouraged that you submit your feedback and bug reports to the project’s Git Hub page.

Features of the plugin include:

A cart system for purchasing multiple downloads at once

A complete promotional code system

Many payment gateways. PayPal and Manual are included by default with Stripe, PayPal Pro, PayPal Express, and others available as add-ons (once the plugin is out of beta)

Complete payment history

User purchase history and ability to redownload files

Multiple files per downloadable product

Customizable purchase receipts

Earnings and sales charts

Marcus’ Take: Excellent start to something that I’m looking forward to using in the future. If you are looking for a digital download solution, you’ll want to give this one a look.

Plugins covered this episode:

John’s & Marcus Rant:

Computers suck sometimes, as I was working along on sat getting some great stuff done you know about 15 windows opens music blaring and all that good jazz and suddenly a great big pop and that lovely smell of Ozone.

Shout Outs:

Thanks for all the ratings on ituines us store

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

What I Say:
Nice and easy to setup for the most part it does take some time to configure up. What I wanted it for was to bring the facebook timline over to the website in a clean way. The gardest pat was finding the Facebook feed URL, here is a tip on how to get it https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=atom10&id=youorfacebook-page-id-number-not-name
It works pretty well and I like the way it imports the info over.Rating: 4 Dragons

Advanced Category Excluder 1.4.3

What They Say:
This plugin was born because there was a no other real alternative to enable content sparationd and some CMS like functionalities in WordPress. The main goal was, to enhance WordPress’s functionalities, to hide some unwanted categories, from defined parts of the blog.
Today, ACE can override your search results, your RSS feed listing, your category listing, your recent post, and recent post widgets and also your entry page, or even hide whole categories of posts from web crawlers if you want to. This is great, for SEO reasons, for content separation, for grouping information, and handle them as real sub pages.

What I Say:
Although this plugin is ancient by WordPress standards, I thought I would give it a whirl since it had been recommended to me. I found it to be an interesting plugin that will allow you to hide not only catagories from site section but also specific link and blogroll links. It seems to function well with no errors and pretty easy to get going.Rating: 4 Dragons

This Episodes new Plugin:
QR Color Code Generator Basic 1.0

What They Say:
Everywhere you look you see QR Codes these days. With the mobile device market growing at a fast pace, QR Codes are becoming very important marketing tools. With a scan of a mobile phone or tablet, they can direct people to your website, the location of your business, etc. This generator will allow you to create QR Codes and give them their own identity.
FEATURES

What I Say:
Wow what can I say this is fantastic for the basic plugin, simple elegant and works like a hotdam. You can create a Qcode in any colour you want. You can create them for not only webpages but email addresses, an SMS message, a phone number my fav here is a QR code for your Wireless network. Also one you create them it keeps them in a manage area so you can go back after them time and time again. Once created you simply download it as a png or a pdf ready to use.Rating 5 Dragons.

**** Plugins Reviewed by Marcus ****

WP-Blacklister

This plugin creates an admin paged called Blacklist under the Settings menu that contains 3 text boxes which are automatically populated with lists of all the IP addresses, urls, and email addresses of comments marked as spam. This makes it easy to include in your comment moderation/blacklist or to export for other uses.

Rating 4 out of 5

Calendar_plugin

This plugin integrates google calender api to wordpress admin page.
There are a lot of different calendar options for WordPress, but why not team up with the big G for full functionality? I’ve tried this, and though a bit buggy in connecting and syncing data quickly, this is a great overall plugin for calendar collaboration.

Rating 3 out of 5

Pinterest Plugin

Show the Pinterest “Pin It” button on top of your images, only when people move their mouse over the image.

This plugin doesn’t display the Pinterest “Pin It” button underneath your blog post like a few other plugins out there. Instead it shows the “Pin It” button on top of the image itself, when your readers move their mouse over the image. This makes it easier for your readers to select exactly which image they want to pin.

The plugin also sends your image alt text to Pinterest as default ‘Description.’
Pinterest sends more traffic than Youtube, Linkedin, Google+, Reddit and other social websites. That is why, if you want to attract traffic from Pinterest, you should install this plugin to your blog.

Plugins covered this episode:

John’s & Marcus Rant: What to rant about?

Well I just wish there were enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do. Spent the entire weekend teaching classes. BTW if would like to hire a teacher I am available online or in person contact me for details.

Shout Outs:

One out to Glenn who called me early this morning while I was getting ready for work I didn’t recognize the number so I let it go to voice mail.

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

What They Say:The plugin creates a shortcode to be used in a widget to display a nice horizontal newsticker which can be placed in a sidebar. Since 0.7: one can use a php tag or shortcode to insert it in the theme template, widgets or posts, all tuning moved to Settings Based upon liScroll.js by Gian Carlo Mingati. Tested in WordPress 3.0+ only, expected to be compatible from 2.6+. Demo: https://chernivtsi.ws (in Ukrainian).
What I Say:I loved the sample on their site but I was unable to duplicate the sample and the instructions for use are very limited and I simply did not have the time to figure it out so I had to pass on this one..
Rating 2 Dragons

What They Say:A JQuery based News Ticker Displays a sliding or fading list of post titles, rss reeds or comments and excerpts with links to post. Starting from ver.2.0 the ticker can also be used as a featured posts image gallery
You can display:

Most Popular Posts over the last x days (via WordPress.com Stats Plugin)

Most Commented Posts

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Specific Posts

Number of Posts to display

Your default RSS feed, your Comments RSS or even an RSS feed from another site, like Twitter or your favorite news site.

You can set:

Category Filter

Ticker Length in characters

What I Say:Unfortunately I had to abandon this one because it was simply not widget ready and I do not have the time to make it that way. It requires you to enter code directly into your template. But it would be great for someone to fork off of since it is pretty complete in many other ways.
Rating 2 Dragons

What They Say:jQuery animated WordPress widget that displays the newest of news in a a silky smooth scrolling news ticker in the sidebar. Full documentation is available to delight and inform. Need help? Check out the excellent, free community support here on WordPress. Need a heaping’ helping’ of help? Premium support is available for at crazy low rates.
What I Say:This one works pretty great in that all you need to do is install and then add widget and configure it there. The instructions were pretty simple and I had it running in a fem in. If you need just new then you simply create a new category and assign that category to it and you will be in great shape. I like the way it move from one story to the next and I imagine with some creative CSS you can make it great.
Rating 4 Dragons

I think you’ve heard of WP-Cache or WP Super Cache, they are both top plugins for WordPress, which make your site faster and responsive. Forget about them – with DB Cache Reloaded your site will work much faster and will use less disk space for cached files. Your visitors will always get actual information in sidebars and server CPU loads will be as low as possible.

Plugins covered this episode:

John’s & Marcus Rant: What to rant about?

just some random thoughts about CMS system and moving and domain issues around SSL and damn too many plugins not enough hours in the day to check them all out. Plus I realized after this past week of polishing up 6 sites that wow I have so many different configurations for WordPress it is actually incredible on how to keep track of them all. Plus the joy of conversion from osCommerce finally an easy way to convert your database.

plus I wanted to say that I wish to thank the listeners who are sending work my way and those that I cannot accomplish I do pass along to someone knowledgeable who will certainly help you get the job done.. You know who you all are thanks.

Oh yea Diablo 3 will launch on May 15 for those who care and also if your a Warcraft player the beta of Pandaren Mists is out.

Shout Outs:

This week has been pretty quiet on all fronts guess everyone has been busy as I have been.

Listener Feedback / Audio Clips

None this week get to it folks only take a couple min on the site.

List of interesting sites that run on WordPress:

https://www.letainguitars.com/ this one is interesting in how they have made WordPress do some interesting flash type layout a nice theme but seems to have some limitations.

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

**** Plugins Reviewed by John ****

What They Say:The easy-to-use WordPress plug-in that recycles your blog posts into a monthly newsletter and sends it out automatically, every month!
Easy Automatic Newsletter plug-in does exactly what it is called. Instead of sweating bullets every time it’s time to make a newsletter, all you need to focus on with our plug-in is to keep blogging and tweeting great content. If you can write a blog post every week you will have enough content for your newsletter. If you write more than that, you’ll have a robust newsletter begging the question from recipients “How do you have time to do that?”
Let’s face it, not everyone you already know reads your blog. And in an age where recycling is good, don’t let great content be used for a single audience.
What I Say:This plugin is great very simple to setup the only tech part is you have to create a proper cron job for it to run a pretty simple thing to do on most hosting providers and if yours does not have that then time to switch.
Formatting for newsletter was clean the only issue I had and I have contacted the author of the plugin for is to be able to shorten the stories posted in the newsletter. Richard contacted me back pretty quick and is working on some changes to the plugin to make it easier to use great response.
Turns out Richard was great and has already updated the plugin between the time I reviewed it last week and today’s show way to go Richard
Rating 5 Dragons

What They Say:Add social links such as Twitter or Facebook in each post.
You can choose the buttons to be displayed such as :

Twitter

FaceBook

LinkedIn

Viadeo

GoogleBuzz

Google+

StumbleUpon

Pinterest

Print

This plugin is under GPL licence.

What I Say:
Well I needed a new plugin for social buttons to replace the one we reviewed many episodes back seems it was having issues loading with the site I was working on so I needed to replace it and this is what I found.
The best part was it also included pinterest since that has become pretty popular it was all great until one issue for some reason it would not display at the top on any pages but worked fine with posts. as I like the design this is a minor issue at this time but still makes it down in it rating.
Rating 3 Dragons

What They Say:A really simple and easy to use plugin to help gain control of the new Admin Bar. This gives you options to change who sees the Admin Bar based on their user role, change or override the default styling or remove the Admin Bar altogether. It adds a menu to the Admin Bar which gives you the ability to disable it on a single page or sitewide for a single browser session.
WP Custom Admin Bar supports Custom Roles.
What I say:

Simple easy and seems to work great for limiting the admin bar to other users..
rating 5 Dragons

What Thay Say:My Calendar provides event management and numerous methods to display your events. The plug-in can support individual site calendars within WordPress Multi-User, or multiple calendars displayed by categories of or locations for events.
Basic Features:

Standard calendar grid or list views of events

Show events in monthly, weekly, or daily view.

Mini-calendar view for compact displays (as widget or as shortcode)

Widget to show todays events

and more….

What I Say:
I stumbled on this one by accident and found it to be a great event calendar that is simple. It is pretty easy to setup and works great if you just want to supply event listings and nothing else. Although it does have a payment module I may get to testing it one day.
Rating 4 Dragons

**** Plugins Reviewed by Marcus ****

Stuck in Southern California with no power seems there is a pretty big outage there.

Plugins covered this episode:

John’s & Marcus Rant: What to rant about?

Report on WPDBSpringclean — Wow what a difference I placed it on my site and cleaned out the junk and does it ever run better..

Shout Outs:

Listener Feedback / Audio Clips

Carole Baskin bigcatrescue.org — can’t see site in ie. what i found was a bit strange when I first went to look at it I was unable to see it but did nit out I was able to see it fine and chdec ked it on 4 different machines all good, but I did discover by running a markup validation at https://validator.w3.org the site produced 38 errors and 2 warnings and when looking I saw several bad spots in the code that need fixed here is a quick screen cast on what I found https://screencast.com/t/F4n1R0U3hOCP

List of interesting sites that run on WordPress:

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

What I Say:
I found myself having to look for another autobackup plugin for a client because his site had gotten too large for the current plugin we were using. What was happening was that due to the size of the zip file being created it would no longer properly upload to Amazon S3 so I went looking and found this.
This plugin is great it not only uploads to Amazon S3 but FTP, Google Storage, Sugar Snyc, MIcrosoft Azure, Rackspace and my Fav Dropbox only there is a limit of 150mg to Dropbox due to their API hopefully they change that in the future..

It not only does the backup but allows you to include or exclude different content such as tables, plugins themes and more. It can also be set to do regular maintenance on your database all in all this is a great plugin..
Rating 5 Dragons

What They Say:In a world full of ad blockers affiliate programs are gaining popularity. Direct links and self-hosted images bypass ad blockers. By using this simple to use plugin your can create a widget with six 125×125 affiliate ads side by side. If the area you place the widget is less than 250px after any padding the widget will display in a single row instead of side by side.
What I Say:Pretty straight forward in it istall and use just install activte and the upload a couplr 125x images to media and then go to the configuration page and enter url for image and the link they jump to not too bad a simple 125 ad block manager but no stats.
Rating 4 Dragons

What They Say:WP Gift Certificate Reloaded Lite is a plugin which allows you to manage and sell printable gift certificates on your website. You can sell them to your visitors, and accept payments via PayPal. It’s easy, install the plugin and open new feature for your customers!
How the plugin works?
FRONT END
The visitor view part of the plugin consists of simple form where your visitors can purchase gift certificates.
Front end workflow. Let’ imagine that I sell gift certificate for visiting museum, and you are the visitor who purchases the certificate.

You fill up the form and click “Continue” button. Then system asks you to confirm your action. …

What I Say:Mildly difficult to setup not completely clear on how visitors will access purchase of certs. It turned out to be a freemium version badly crippled that I could not get to function properly, I discovered this only after I hit the website to find out how to create a page or something for people in front end. I have no issue with freemium and in fact I encourage and promote them I do think they need to be more upfront about it though.

It does a great job manually creation of the cert not too sure about the rest may have to buy the premium..
Rating 3 Dragons

**** Plugins Reviewed by Marcus ****

User Login Stat

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-login-stat/
A simple plugin that tracks registered users login statistics per day. You can track how many registered users are signing in to your site everyday.You can track how many registered users are signing in to your site everyday.

WP Sliding Login | Register Panel

Add a sliding login or register panel to WordPress Theme.
Instead of modifying directly theme files, just install this plugin so you can preserve you panel when switching between themes and during themes updates.

Marcus’ Take:

This is a great plugin for providing an alternate user login experience for your site members. Too often I’ve been forced to use the stock /wp-login area, and this is a really nice design element to put into place. Works with any theme.

An argument I have had with many people over the years I have been involved in the computer industry has revolved around security. It usually goes like this:

Friend: You should get a Mac they are so much more secure from viruses than a PC.

Me: and why is that is their code better?

Friend: well I am not sure but they are not attacked.

Me: Yup you’re correct there but have you ever wondered about that? Think for a moment how much smaller the market is for Macs vs. PCs.

Friend: that does not make much difference

Me: really

An I am sure you can guess the rest, in a nut shell it is simple if you are a large enough target you will be attacked it does not matter what really. This has so become true of WordPress the largest CMS platform for building a website on the internet. It has become so large that it is estimated that 25% of the web now runs on WordPress. That is allot of web sites.

So of course the hackers, spammers and scammers have targeted this very large area. In particular it is much like Windows with multiple versions and many that are unsecure this makes for very easy targets and let’s face it the hackers are simply a lazy bunch.

But you do not need to become a statistic and fall prey to the hackers and scammers, all you really need to do is keep your WordPress Website up to date. It is a pretty painless process you can do yourself or you can hire someone like me to handle it for you.

To complete the update simply log into your WordPress admin area and simply click the yellow bar telling you that you need to do updates and let it walk you through the process and 98% of the time it will be very smooth and have no issues. If you do have any issues please feel free to contact me at 250-885-2888 or via my contact page to get some help putting you back online.

https://wppluginsatoz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/SP0016051M.jpg18001201John Overallhttps://wppluginsatoz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/WPPlugins300x100sitelogo.pngJohn Overall2012-03-07 12:53:452012-03-07 12:53:45You have a Great WordPress website So why Isn’t up to to Date?

pretty simple to install and just seems to work. I tested it with a power point presentation and it loaded it just fine the only issue I discovered is that you need to save to 2003 version or earlier.. It does have one draw back I see and that it presents you with slides and not the show..

Google Doc Embedder lets you embed several types of files into your WordPress pages using the Google Docs Viewer – allowing inline viewing (and optional downloading) of the following file types, with no Flash or PDF browser plug-ins required:

Adobe PDF

Microsoft Word (DOC/DOCX)

Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT/PPTX)

and more….

What I Say:Trouble in paradise I could not seem to get this one to work at all….
Rating 1 Dragon

I had to revert to the first one which works with some minor issues but is usable at this moment there does not seem to be a great way to embed a full PowerPoint presentation directly in your site unless you use a service like SlideShare or Prezi.com

What they Say:The plugin allows browsing downloading and uploading of files to dropbox. Many more features have been added.
To access your dropbox you will need to set up a dropbox app in order to get a consumer key and a secret key.<br/>
1) Go to https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps
2) Click “Create an App”
3) Add a name and description
4) Copy and paste the two codes in thee corresponding text boxes of the plugin options screen

To display the box use the shortcode: [dropbox]
What I Say:This plugin works very it does require you to create an API app at drop box but even that is a painless process I found and only took a couple min to accomplish. It works great and if you are in need of a way to have instant file sharing with your website then this is the solution for you. If you do not yet have dropbox then you can sign up for it here https://db.tt/1giOopz its free and I sure can use the extra space when you sign up.

Rating 5 Dragons

This weeks Bonus New Plugin

FG Joomla to WordPress 1.2.0

What they Say:This plugin migrates sections, categories, posts, images and medias from Joomla to WordPress.
It has been tested with Joomla 1.5 and WordPress 3.3.1 on huge databases (15 000+ posts)
Major features include:

migrates Joomla sections as categories

migrates categories as sub-categories

migrates Joomla posts

uploads all the posts media in WP uploads directories (in option)

modifies the post content to keep the media links

resizes images according to the sizes defined in WP

defines the thumbnail to be the first post image

keeps the alt image attribute

What I say:I used this on a brand new install of WordPress no plugins installed at all or even a theme change yet. It adds a new importer under the import menu. First go clean out all the default junk installed with WordPress i.e., sample post & page and junk plugins like Akisment, hello dolly. Enter proper joomla database info and hit import then go have a smoke then check for any items it did not get and copy them over other than it went very well. I like it much smoother than the other one I used to use..

Rating 5 Dragons

**** Plugins Reviewed by Marcus ****

Newstastic recent posts scroller

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/newstastic-post-slider/
Author: David HenryThis little widget will display your posts from all or selected categories in a horizontal or vertical format, you can select a few options on what you’d like to show and set the width, height etc. This is a first release and the author welcomes feedback.

Marcus’ Take: This is a great solution for those designers looking for something to put on the bottom widget of the sidebar. This is a stylish plugin that provides a really nice sliding deck of posts.

Rating: 4 of 5

Plugin Directory Stats

Marcus’ Take: While it may be a bit too much shop talk, I found this plugin to be a great solution for anyone out there looking to feature plugins on their site. Heck, maybe this one is just good for John and I, but this is one of the die-hards.

Many plugins do not clean up their database tables after you uninstall them.
What happens most of the time is that the plugin files and folder is deleted but not the corresponding plugin database tables.

This where this plugin comes to the rescue. The WPDBSpringClean plugin identifies unused, WordPress DB tables which have been left over from old plugins you have uninstalled on your site and it then gives you the option of deleting these tables.

Marcus’ Take: Spring is coming, so what better time to do some cleaning of your WordPress site as well. This is a welcome addition to my sites. Once I ran it on one of my old sites, it seemed to have doubled the load speed! Check it out on your sites and see how it works for you!

John’s & Marcus Rant: What to rant about?

Sick children and Just a random rant about the lack of other WordPress podcasts, and their inconsistencies such as WPCandy’s, if any listeners know of any other podcasts please drop me a line or make a comment on the website about them.

Please leave us a comment from speakpipe on our new website.

Shout Outs:

Joe Campbell thanks for great review on new website.

List of interesting sites that run on WordPress:

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

Goal of this plugin: Simplify the WordPress upload and image insert process as much as possible.

Using ImagePro, you can:

upload of multiple files directly from your desktop

perform smooth image resize (a perfect resize is created based on your resized picture in the editor)

easily manage the media collection (search, filter by file type)

drag and drop any image to the post and have it resized the way you want

What I say:

I was in need of a plugin to manage image upload size after the fact and in particular control the featured image size sine the slider I was using depended on that. This plugin made it easy to manage the image sizes and it also has a great little feature where it shows you all available images in you media library and you can scroll though them and then simply drag and drop them into your posts.

Genesis Featured Images creates a option box to enable a default image for post thumbnails and/or featured images and a meta box to set a custom size for the featured image to be displayed. These default images will only appear any time a post, page or any custom post type does not have a featured image, or an image inside the post. So for those who write a lot of posts and want one image for the majority of your posts, this plugin works perfectly! Genesis Featured Images filters genesis_get_image() so anywhere you utilize genesis_get_image(), this plugin will provide a fallback option. Genesis Featured Images uses the WordPress Image Uploader and Library to upload the image to ensure that the proper thumbnails are created.

This is another great little simple image plugin. I need something to set a default featured image on a site I was setting up that had lots of back content but no featured image on many posts. This allows you to set a default image for just such an event. It also has a setting in the post area that allows you to specify the default featured image site on that post a great then when using something like the slider plugin.

Plugin to allow guests of your blog create posts without signup or sign in. You have some options as: set how many posts can be created per ID daily, default user and category to create new posts, etc.

To start showing the form you must use the chartag [publish_posts_without_signup], put it right on the place you want the form appears.

What I say:

A great simple little plugin to allow letting your guest put content up for you. It has a moderation feature to prevent it from being posted automatically. Not sure yet how the spammers will deal with it but I will know in a couple of days.

Rating 4 Dragons.

**** Plugins Reviewed by Marcus ****

—Marcus Plugins:

Dynamic Registration Links

As an example this can be used for a download link – forcing site users to register and login on your site to download the file. This is highly beneficial for SEO purposes as you do not need to block entire site pages from unregistered users, just the link is altered – which allows search engines to still index your pages.

This is done dynamically through Javascript which picks up a specific class placed on any link on your site, add the class=”authenticatelink” on any link in content text in a widget, post, page, excerpt or even in your site comments. These links will now force login if user is not logged in, if a user is logged in the link will remain with its original link address.

Marcus’ Take:

Great plugin for anyone with a member site trying to keep the SEO juice, yet limit access to particular content.

Rating: 4 out of 5
—–

All Authors Page

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-author-page/
A effective, simple and easy way to show all your staff, content writers, experts, contributors etc. in one easy place for your customers

Need a simple page for the Authors and Contributors to your site? Tired of constantly updating and tweaking links to social media sites? Want to show of the experienced and amazing people on your staff?
This plugin adds a page called All Authors Page to your site and automagically adds every one with the selected roles to the page. Now there is a simple and easy way to show all your staff, content writers, experts, contributors etc. in one easy place. With easily inter-changeable role selection, automatic Gravatar pictures for any of your staff subscribed to Gravatar, and effortless & good looking social media buttons, it’s simply too accessible not to have it!

Marcus’ Take:

I’ve been looking for something like this for an online version of a magazine that I had developed for a client. This one is a great use of the “end credits” type functionality to give credit to your authors.
Rating: 4 out of 5
———

Ultimate Maintenance Mode

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-maintenance-mode/
The Ultimate Maintenance Mode plugin displays a screenshot of your website with an overlayed window and the reason your site is down.

Excellent improvement on the white screen of death that we all to often see in WordPress while upgrading or performing theme maintenance. This adds both style and functionality to the fray. Long overdue and a welcome plugin addition to all of my sites.

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